Studies for Cognitive psychology

Name: Context Dependant Memory Experiment 

Aim: To investighate wether a natraul envirmoent can act as a cue for recall

Procedure: 

• 18 Divers, had to try recal 36 random two-three sylobal words, words were recorded on a taperecorder 
• Their where four different conditions of the experiment which all divers completed (Reapeted Measures) which were: DD,WW, DW, WD (W=wet D=dry) 
• Each list of words was read twice and following this 15 numbers had to written down by the divers in order to remove the words from STM 

Results: 50% higher recall when the encoding and recall enviroment where the same: 13.5 and 11.4 where as the different conditions gained an average of 8.5.

Conclusion: This backs the theory of cue depedancy and that enviroment can act a a cue for recall.

+ The fact that the experiment was not held in a lab and that it used real divers gives it more ecological validity,as it was areal enviroment the participants would know.

+ The participants where also researchers them selves and therefore were unlikely to cheat therefore it could suggest that there was less demand charactistics.

- Lack of control: equipment failure, inconsitant diving location, lack of standardisation and timing could akll have affetced the results. Furthermore when divers where under water they where not observed, so cheating may occur. All of these factors could ahve effected the reliabilty of the study.

- I t is also argued that the sample is not representative of a wider population, all where interlectuals who studied at university, which in the 70's was a minority. However the Original aim of the study was to investigate why oil rig divers suffered with memory loss therefore using divers is a good representation of their target population.

Name: Levels of Processing study (Craik and Tulving 1972)

Aim: to investigate how deep and shallow processing affects memory recall.

Procedure: 

• 60 prticipantsgiven 60 words which had particular questions attached to them
• These questions went something like this "is the word in capital letters or lower case?" (structual), "what does the word rhyme with" (phonetic), "does the word go in this sentence?" (semantic) 
• Participants where then given a long list of 180 words, they had to pick out the words from the original list.

Results: semantic: 70% phonetic: 35% structual: 15%

Conclusion: Semantic questions cause a more in depth rehearsal (elobrotive) which leads to a more accurate recall, on the other hand structual and phoneticall take a lot less rehearsal and therefore recall is worse. 

- Internal validity is relativly low, lacks mudane realism because remembering a list of words is not a day to day action, and therefore is deemed an unnatrual task and therefore the study has very minimal relevance in telling us how our every-day memory work...

+... however because there where no extraneous variables which affcted the exeriment which can be seen by the cause and affect between the IV and DV therefore though it lacks internal validity it is deemed as a reliable experiment.

- Furthermore the twenty participants is a very small sample of students, which does not give a representation of the whole population therefore the results cannot be generalised to a wider group of indaviduals.

- Craik and Tulving wanted their participants to be inceidental learners and therefore they had to break ethical issues of informed consent to create the study, therefor some believe that understanding how memory works might o be sufficient to warant the deception of participants.